News got out today that Xbox frontman Phil Spencer has been promoted to a new role as Microsoft’s executive vice president of gaming, and will now have a seat at the table of Microsoft’s senior leadership group.
This is slightly surprising when you consider that a few years ago, investors were speculating the company would sell off its Xbox business and focus on mobile and enterprise software.
Of course, company chief Satya Nadella later stipulated that games were key to Microsoft’s “broader vision for Windows”, and the company has since taken steps (from a Windows 10 ‘Game Mode’ to the cross-platform Play Anywhere initiative) to improve the experience of people playing games across its platforms.
Spencer (who took over as head of Xbox in 2014) has long been a vocal proponent of such efforts, reiterating to Gamasutra earlier this year that “I definitely think about Xbox Live as something that’s more pervasive than just sitting on the console.”
Going forward, he’ll now be reporting directly to Nadella and presumably sharing such thoughts more regularly with the other 15 members of Microsoft’s leadership team, all of whom are executive VPs or C-level (CEO, CTO, etc) executives.